The Form/Content Formula: Parallel Between Pre-Industrial Cinema and Current New Media Practice

Symposium:

• ISEA98: Ninth International Symposium on Electronic Art
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• The Form/Content Formula: Parallel Between Pre-Industrial Cinema and Current New Media Practice

• Luc Courchesne

• Contemporary media artists doing installations, by the creative attention they give to both form and content, appear to be looking for a formula that could, by it general appeal, launch a new content based industry. I like to compare their work to that of early cinematographers who had to develop simultaneously the technology to create the content, the content itself and also the context in which the content could be delivered. We tend to forget that today’s cinema industry with it’s relatively stable technologies, unionised workers, marketing strategies, distribution networks, star systems and millionaires, evolved from modest experiments attempting to adequate form with content. In that sense, cinema can be seen as a hugely successful installation. In this timely turn of a millennium, new computing and connecting technologies appear to invite new type of contents just as individuals and societies are trying to look at themselves and at the world in new ways. The example of early cinema will give today’s media artists doing installations a sense of the time it might take for their experimental field to evolve into an art and an industry.

Category:

• Paper